(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus, and method for using such an apparatus, for monitoring the health of devices such as gas turbine engines.
(2) Description of Related Art
Aircraft gas-turbine engine data is available from a variety of sources including on-board sensor measurements, maintenance histories, and component models. An ultimate goal of Propulsion Health Monitoring (PHM) is to maximize the amount of meaningful information that can be extracted from disparate data sources to obtain comprehensive diagnostic and prognostic knowledge regarding the health of the engine. Data Fusion is the integration of data or information from multiple sources to achieve improved accuracy and more specific inferences than can be obtained from the use of a single sensor alone. Applications include reducing health management system false alarms and missed detections, improving engine diagnostics for the accurate isolation of faults, and increasing the scope of engine prognostic capabilities.
In many instances, the multiple data streams to be fused via data fusion are comprised of streams of digital data. As a result, the sampling rate of one stream of data is likely to be different from that of the other data streams. Such a difference in sampling rates poses a hurdle to the real time integration and fusion of engine data. What is therefore needed is a method for performing data fusion on multiple streams of digital data having different sample rates to obtain comprehensive diagnostic and prognostic knowledge regarding the health of the engine.